Pamela Anderson was once one of the most recognisable women on the planet. Baywatch, the TV show she starred in during the 1990s, was watched by more people than any other series in history: at its peak, an estimated 1.1 billion viewers around the world tuned in each week to see her play CJ Parker alongside David Hasselhoff’s Mitch Buchannon, two of a crack squad of lifeguards patrolling the beaches of Los Angeles.
She also appeared in movies, music videos and not a few issues of Playboy magazine. She became such an icon that Virgin Cola launched the Pammy, a bottle shaped to honour her curves. When she was at Palms, the Las Vegas casino resort, they’d remove the L from the neon sign, Anderson says, to make it Pams.
And then she became a laughing stock. In the mid-1990s a disgruntled contractor who claimed they owed him money stole a safe from the home Anderson shared with her husband at the time, Tommy Lee, the drummer in the American rock band Mötley Crüe.
The most valuable item he found inside it turned out to be a private recording the couple had made while on holiday. Duly leaked, it became perhaps the most famous sex tape of all time – and, Time magazine points out, the first viral video of the early internet age. It estimates that the video earned its exploiters €75 million.
Anderson clapped back. She proved her comedic worth in the sitcoms VIP and Stacked and was then a great sport in Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan.
“Acting is like survival,” she says from her home on Vancouver Island, on the west coast of Canada, where she was also born and grew up, in a working-class family with Finnish and Russian ancestry. “We’re all doing it all the time, by the way. It’s what’s simmering beneath the surface. It’s what we connect with. It’s a porous form of communication.”
Anderson, who apologises for the noise when we talk – “My dogs might bark,” she says, as “everybody is inside” on a snowy day – kept clapping back.
She wrote two novels. She spent years campaigning for the release of Julian Assange, the WikiLeaks founder, repeatedly visiting the Ecuadorean embassy in London during his years-long “stay” there and helping to fund his protracted legal and political fights.
In 2022 she clapped back against Pam & Tommy, a yuckfest of a TV show based on her ordeal, as “salt on the wound”.
The following year she was the subject of Pamela: A Love Story, a bright documentary series, available on Netflix, that reveals a wisecracking, articulate woman who survived childhood sexual abuse, read Tennessee Williams while she was being photographed for Playboy, and journals furiously. Her sons, Brandon Thomas Lee – a producer of the series – and Dylan Jagger Lee, wanted her to “set the record straight” on screen.
“I used to wonder where I can put all of this,” the 57-year-old says. “But I write poetry. I write all the time. I have my open journal on Substack. I’ve been doing that for a while. I just needed somewhere to put my life when I felt like life was really like death for me. Writing was life saving.”
In 2025 Anderson has got the respect she so richly deserves, with nominations for a Screen Actors Guild award and a Golden Globe – and, according to many industry pundits, probably coming within a hair’s breadth of an Oscar nomination – for her gritty turn in The Last Showgirl, Gia Coppola’s new film.
It’s the bittersweet story of a 50-something veteran dancer who, as well as trying to mend relations with her adult daughter, is clinging to her spot at Le Razzle Dazzle, a classic Las Vegas revue that is about to be cancelled after three decades.
Anderson, who beams as she talks about the movie, is aware of her poignant overlap with its heroine. “This is a story about second chances,” she says. “It’s a story about a woman who’s been discounted and discarded. She’s fighting back in her own way, in the only way she knows how.
“I love that she’s representative of so many of us working against the odds to do what we love. There’s definitely a kismet connection. She’s far from perfect. She’s messy. She makes mistakes, and she wears her heart on her sleeve. She’s not a pushover.
“There was so much that I could play with here and bring a lot of my own life experience to create a character that’s completely unlike me.”
It’s never too late to start again. It’s never too late for your career. It’s never too late to be the victor and not the victim
— Pamela Anderson
The Last Showgirl is Coppola’s third feature. The granddaughter of Francis Ford Coppola and niece of Sofia Coppola is less famous than her cousins Nicolas Cage and Jason Schwartzman. But her films are quietly dazzling. This one is a character study worthy of the postclassical Hollywood period that her famous grandfather helped to forge.
When Coppola was planning the film she had an image of a classical star such as Marilyn Monroe in her head. Then she caught an episode of Pamela: A Love Story.
“Shelly is such a nostalgic character,” she says. “Your imagination draws you back to an earlier time. Seeing Pamela’s documentary, of course, I could see an artist that is our modern Marilyn. She is someone that wasn’t getting to showcase all that she has within her. She has such a wealth of knowledge and loves philosophy and old plays.
“I was so excited to get to know her as a person. We have such similar tastes. We both love the French new wave and Carl Jung. There is so much about Pamela that is overlooked because of the exterior, because of how beautiful she is. I think Marilyn Monroe struggled with that same thing.
“It’s also a mother-daughter story. I really relate to that,” says Coppola, who was raised by her mother, Jacqueline de la Fontaine, a costume designer. The director’s father, Gian-Carlo Coppola – her own full name is Gian-Carla Coppola, in tribute – died before she was born, at the age of 22, in a horrifying speedboat incident. “And becoming a mum myself, I really understand the sort of systemic constrictions when you’re a creative working mother.”
When the script for The Last Showgirl arrived, Anderson’s agent turned it down. Anderson’s son did not.
“That’s what happens. It happens a lot, I guess. People are trying to protect you,” Anderson says about the agent (who, unsurprisingly, is no longer representing her). “I guess they think they know what you want, and maybe they don’t want to disturb you. I can’t figure it out, but the fact that it almost slipped through my fingers makes it even more precious to me.
“Usually, in your life, you can look back and think, ‘Okay, it almost didn’t happen. What would my life be if I didn’t do that?’ This was a close one. And thank God I got to do this.”
Anderson says she has been deluged with calls from fellow actors and directors who love the film. “I didn’t expect that reaction from my peers,” she says. “It’s just been an incredible experience to peel it all back and to remember what I really love and what I want to do with my life.
“Just thinking about those things and then having this opportunity at this point in my life – it’s never too late to start again. It’s never too late for your career. It’s never too late to be the victor and not the victim. That’s such a nice message.”
[ From the archive: Coppola dynasty: three generations of Coppola in filmOpens in new window ]
Anderson certainly seems to have been taken advantage of during her career. In her memoir, Love, Pamela, she records an early on-set encounter with Tim Allen, the star of Home Improvement, the sitcom that gave Anderson her first significant TV role.
“On the first day of filming, I walked out of my dressingroom, and Tim was in the hallway in his robe,” she writes. “He opened his robe and flashed me quickly – completely naked underneath. He said it was only fair, because he had seen me naked. Now we’re even. I laughed uncomfortably. It was the first of many bizarre encounters where people felt they knew me enough to make absolute fools out of themselves.”
It’s really striking a nerve. There are so many of us women who keep secrets or feel ashamed. We reinvent ourselves
— Pamela Anderson
In Anderson’s account – Allen denied the whole incident, telling the entertainment magazine Variety that he would never do such a thing – he had been referring to her nude modelling: she had appeared on her first Playboy cover a couple of years earlier, after being discovered at a football game in Vancouver city. (She had been shown on the stadium’s Jumbotron.)
Two decades ago, several years after the end of her marriage to Lee – who was sentenced to six months in jail for spousal abuse after assaulting her – Anderson willingly played the victim, agreeing to be the target of a scalding Comedy Central roast in return for a $200,000 donation to People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, the high-profile animal-rights organisation she has collaborated with for years.
When Sarah Silverman praised her “amazing work” with animals, especially the “one-eyed trouser snake”, Anderson laughed gamely before responding with, “I want to thank Jimmy, Adam, Greg, Nick, Andy, and everyone else in the room that Sarah Silverman has f**ked.”
Few people can have a clearer notion than Anderson of the fine line between contemporary ideas about sex positivity and exploitation.
Today she is unfailingly polite – and is not wearing any make-up. She stopped wearing it altogether during Paris Fashion Week in 2023. She has also chosen not to undergo cosmetic procedures to try to preserve the Playboy- and Baywatch-era Pamela Anderson. She has never looked better.
“I am Shelly,” she says. “So many films are about the exploitation of women and violence against women. This film is so touching – and it didn’t have to go there. It’s just about a regular girl that had dreams and is now hitting a crossroads, along with generations of other women.
“It really talks to many women. You can bring generations of women with you to this film. My mum brought 12 of her friends, and they cried through the whole movie. It was so funny.
“But it’s really striking a nerve. There are so many of us women who keep secrets or feel ashamed. We reinvent ourselves. But beauty is perishable. It comes from within. And what makes an interesting person is much more than physicality.”
Anderson thinks deeply about her encounters with women over the years.
“I did meet a lot of women who are now dance instructors or sell real estate and have all sorts of careers afterwards,” she says. “They seem happy. They adore this time in their life. The crossroads is hard. But the crossroads is what this film is about. It’s those moments when we persevere.
“This is a hopeful film which I’d like to bring hope and inspiration to misunderstood and vulnerable characters.”
The Last Showgirl is in cinemas from Friday, February 28th
